The UK government has announced that all 16 to 17-year-olds will be offered a first dose of the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine in the coming weeks. Many countries are already vaccinating children over 12, so this decision is not out of step with what is going on elsewhere. Despite this, theContinue Reading
Every year, on the first Sunday in August, the replica of an 11th-century Viking longboat sails up the river Ulla to the town of Catoira in northern Spain. The boat, manned by townsfolk disguised as Viking warriors, stages a ferocious onslaught on the town which is successfully fended off byContinue Reading
We know very little about the human brain. Orla/Shutterstock Consciousness is arguably the most important scientific topic there is. Without consciousness, there would after all be no science. But while we all know what it is like to be conscious – meaning that we have personal awareness and respond toContinue Reading
Многие научные открытия продолжают оспариваться политиками и частью общественности еще долгое время после достижения научного консенсуса. Например, почти треть американцев до сих пор не согласны с тем, что выбросы ископаемого топлива вызывают изменение климата, даже несмотря на то, что научное сообщество пришло к консенсусу, который они сделали несколько десятилетий назад.Continue Reading
Oisin Murphy, dual Champion jockey, deserves due recognition in this column, which places great emphasis on horse-riding skills, following a fabulous first week of August, and his sensational blitz has nigh on sealed a a hat-trick for the Irishman who, as a lad of 17, first came to light tenContinue Reading
Real Moment/Shutterstock The recent suggestion that ministers may have to consider culling or vaccinating animals to prevent the coronavirus from picking up another dangerous mutation and jumping back to humans may sound like sudden panic, but it’s just part of a long debate among scientists. Evidence that cats could beContinue Reading
Ascending will be difficult to beat if he stays seven furlongs of ‘soft’ Leicester ground today, having shaped well at the Midlands venue on a contrasting ‘good to firm’ surface ten weeks ago; Clive Cox is not a guesser and the Lambourn trainer, along with stable jockey, Adam Kirby, willContinue Reading
From pandemic to scamdemic. HM Treasury, CC BY-SA In the early days of the pandemic, UK chancellor Rishi Sunak announced business-loan schemes as part of the government’s suite of measures to keep businesses on their feet. This offered businesses the chance to borrow tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands ofContinue Reading
STEKLO/Shutterstock Despite the lifting of most legal COVID-19 restrictions on July 19, the pandemic’s effect on the health, economy and wellbeing of the English public is far from over. The latest development is in the form of the “pingdemic” –- the term referring to the hundreds of thousands of peopleContinue Reading
'The only living worker left'. metamorworks “This government is obsessed with skilling up our population,” said Boris Johnson in his recent speech on “levelling up”. There is still a fair amount of uncertainty about exactly what the UK prime minister’s plan to level up the regions will involve, but manufacturingContinue Reading
